I’m not a huge golf fan but with the Ryder Cup being played here in Wisconsin, I was a bit curious about the Whistling Straits course design. There is a good hole-by-hole guide that gives a description of the course.
Selecting a more details link for any hole takes you to a page with additional information. I know enough to know that golfers can start from different tee positions and assumed the numbers for each hole represented the distance for those locations. That’s largely where my understanding of the numbers stops so I was curious why there were five numbers for each hole.
A brother of mine tells me that for those familiar with golf, the colors for each number are fairly established as far as what they mean. Black represents the distance for professionals for example.
This to me is an excellent example of what not to do for web accessibility as far as conveying information with color alone. For those who do not see the colors, as obvious as they might be to golfers, the numbers by themselves are clearly not obvious. Similarly, for those less familiar with golf, I contend attaching a descriptive word to each number would be of benefit.
This is also an illustration of why manual review of web accessibility is so important. I ran multiple accessibility tools on one of these pages. Some contrast errors with other text on the page were flagged but not a single automated tool called attention to these numbers. Automated testing is just not at the point to handle that level of analysis.
This is going to be an example I add to my learning materials on web accessibility. For me it illustrates the concept of not using color alone quite well.
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